From Carts On The Street To International Expansion With The Halal Guys (Ep 180)
Jaime Oikle of RunningRestaurants.com sits down with Chef Shawn Edelman of The Halal Guys to discuss their explosive growth. From their "carts on the street" origin story to franchise expansion plans, they cover a wide range of key topics, including expansion and franchising, simplicity, efficiencies, labor market challenges, career growth, takeout/delivery, and more.
Find out more at The Halal Guys and Running Restaurants.
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From Carts On The Street To International Expansion With Shawn Edelman
We’ve got a great episode for you with Executive Chef Shawn Edelman of The Halal Guys. Welcome, Chef. How are you?
Great. Thank you so much for having me.
Let’s do this first. For folks who may not know the brand, talk about your concept, how you folks got started, and your location footprint these days. What have you got?
We started out in New York City with carts on the street. The goal behind the brand was the founders, who came over as taxi drivers, looked at most of the other taxi drivers and realized that there was no halal food for the taxi drivers to eat. They decided to start to put up carts. They were preparing food at home and bringing the food to the taxi cab drivers. One thing led to another and the explosion of halal food happened mostly through the cab drivers who were in New York City in the early ‘90s and early 2000s. From there, the concept grew and we morphed out and started doing brick and mortars.
I was going to ask you how far it goes back. You’re saying ‘90s and 2000s. When was the first store? When was the first storefront?
First Storefront
The first storefront was in 2007, but the carts were in 1998, I believe. That was the first time the carts appeared in New York City. The carts were a smashing success because it catered to one specific demographic. What ended up happening was that demographic kept growing, and then word of mouth. Everybody wanted to have some of the food because it was so good, regardless of what the ethnicity of the product was.
I’m not sure how long you’ve been with the brand, but as part of your answer, you can let me know. I remember seeing a press release that talked about the 100th store. That’s a lot of growth in a relatively short time span. Talk about that.
The brand has taken off. One of the reasons we’ve been able to have so much success is we keep it simple and focused on good quality ingredients, making sure that the products are cooked to order. They’re never going to see food sitting around for long periods of time, product getting old and product not looking like something that you’d want to eat. The goal behind it is to keep the product as fresh and as clean as possible. With that, we’ve been able to experience some great growth.
As far as the simple menu, I wanted to ask you about that because I did see it on the site or as part of another release. It was to keep it simple and not a lot of menu items. The first thing that comes to mind is efficiency and profitability when you’re not dealing with a lot of stuff. Is that built into the model? Do you see you expanding the menu or do you bring special menu items in? Talk about that.
It’s a great point. The goal, especially in this climate, is to be able to control costs and maximize margins as best as possible. What’s the best way to do that? It’s to run efficient back-of-house kitchens. Minimize your labor. Try to keep the cook times of items as simple and as easy as possible where you’re able to teach the staff quickly and efficient ways in order to produce products.
With that being said, we’re able to hone in on a few items that we make. We’re able to purchase those items in large bulk quantities. Pass those savings along to the franchisees, you could then maximize margins. At the same time, as I mentioned previously, you’re able to control your labor cogs because the goal behind it is to try to make it as simple and clean as possible with the best flavors possible.
Resisting Product Creep
This is a question I always think about because everybody has this brand creep. You could go to the grocery store, where there are 50,000 varieties of everything. I’m sure you go through the same thing, “Why don’t we add this to the menu? Why don’t we do that?” You folks take a very narrow approach. How do you resist that product creep?
What we do is we do run quarterly LTOs. We’ll run the LTOs and we’ll try to pair the LTOs with something as far as what we’re doing on the menu now. The goal is to try to bring something in that’s not a like product to what we already have. That’s where we get to play with the flavors. That’s where we get to experiment a little bit, see what the guess reaction is and what the guess feedback is. Play with different flavors, especially throughout the Middle East. There’s also some fusion stuff where we can pair it with maybe some South American and Middle Eastern flavors. Have fun with it. That’s the goal.
Let’s talk about geography for a second. It started in New York and there are probably more units in that part of the country, but you’ve expanded. It’s pretty wide now. Where are you, guys? What are some other big markets? Where are you going in the future?
Other big markets, for us, again, going to be Houston, Texas. The Texas market is a tremendous market for us. Houston is huge. Dallas is huge. Southern California. Los Angeles is a very big market for us. San Francisco is a big market. Virginia is another big one, and so are New Jersey and New York. Big markets. Overseas now, we’re also in London. We’re in South Korea and in Indonesia.
Franchise And Corporate Locations
International expansion as well. The question for you is everything as you expand franchisee based or are there corporate locations or a combination of?
Combination of all of the above. There are also some combinations where the corporate and franchisee partners. We’ll open some locations. All of the New York locations are corporate-owned. Corporate runs all those locations out of New York. That’s where our beta or our test market takes place. Everything gets tested in that market. Once we’re comfortable with the product, once we know how the product works, user feedback, and work the cogs. We’re able to then roll that out as either an LTO or an item for the franchisees to work through.
You may or may not be involved in the franchisee part. You can answer that or you can speak to it. What is the brand look for in terms of franchisee folks? Are they one location folks? Are they area people doing 5 or 10? What do you see there?
I’m not the person to talk to that in detail but I do know that we’re looking for people who are serious about the brand, want to expand the grant and want to help grow the brand. Those are the most important things to us. I’m not 100% sure, and I don’t know the specifics or the details of the maximum or minimum amounts per specific region or per location.
New York was a big COVID market and I wish we were 100% through that process. What are some of the learnings you took from that in terms of speed of delivery packaging and take out? Maybe online ordering. Talk about that.
This worked well into our wheelhouse because a lot of the footprints of the locations that we have in the New York area, they’re smaller stores. They’re smaller footprints. We’re geared towards either takeout or delivery. That’s what the shops are geared towards. If you look at the carts, the carts are geared more for people who are going to come on the line, pick up the product and keep moving. Either go to their office or go back home.
With that being said, we already had a head start on a lot of other brands and a lot of other concepts because we were so apt in doing that for so long. The one area where we saw great growth was the catering area, family meals, and catering packages. Those items were picked up for us, and we’re able to get ahead of the curve. We put out a great product for families who were either stuck in their houses or people who were stuck at work and we’re able to package meals together. Complete meals across the board and have those delivered to specific offices or specific homes.
Tech And Efficiency Improvements
It’s good. I have a note to ask you about catering. I’m sure I did it before, but it becomes a big focus in something you can continue to do in the future. You probably had a lot of stuff figured out on the tech side, but did you learn some things on the tech side to go faster or more efficiently?
One of the things that works well and makes it a little bit easier for us is the food travels well. That’s already a plus for us. On the tech side, one of the things for us was being able to figure out how to pair items and how to put items together most efficiently. Using tech to be able to try to segregate orders or hold orders apart, everybody has a different ask. Some people want different condiments. Some people want different toppings.
Using tech to streamline orders is key. Efficiently managing different condiments and toppings in large catering orders is a game changer.
When you’re trying to do large catering orders, everybody’s order is completely different. Nobody has the same exact order based on toppings alone. From the tech standpoint, we’re able to use tech to try to create add-ons and subtractions for every single dish and then have those match up in the POS system. That was a little bit of a run for us but we were able to get that down fast and get over that on.
As a user, when we click a box and it says, “Put that with that,” we expect it to work perfectly. We know, historically, when you make that phone call, it’s 50/50 that it’s going to work. You’re a little bit more reliant when you’re clicking a button on an app that it’s going to work. There’s a big disappointment on the customer side when the wrong thing is in the box. It’s a big deal. This has happened to everybody. You get home and you’re like, “Where’s the thing? They didn’t put it in.” That’s a big miss. Take out and delivery can be efficient and expand. You can mess up.
It’s important. Question for you on the labor side. New York and all your markets, I’m sure, experience different labor challenges. Maybe to your wheelhouse is your low footprint, low labor in store, but even still hiring people and finding people. I was on your website a little while. You folks had a nice piece on culture and people. It seems like that’s an important piece of the business. If you could talk about the culture and the philosophy of people, any challenges you guys had, and that stretch of labor being bonkers to find,
We struggled with labor for a while there, too. It was touch and go, but trying to find incentives to keep people coming back. It’s important for us. We want people who want to be in the stores. We want people who want to grow with us, who want to come in, be excited about the brand, and be excited about the product.
Finding incentives to keep people coming back is crucial. Building consumer confidence starts with serving perfect products.
We don’t want to be your normal everyday QSR who’s putting out the product to put the product out. We want the staff to be excited about the product. We want the staff to have a say in the product. One of the things that’s important is we practice, especially from the back-of-house standpoint. We want the staff to taste the food. You’re cooking the product, taste the food. Is it right? Does it fall in line with what we’re practicing and what we’re preaching?
Are you following the guidelines? If it’s not right, don’t serve the product. We preach that we’d rather not serve a product that’s not 100% or 110% correct. We’d rather just 86 and not sell the product that specific day and let the guests know, “We had a problem with the product. The product is not right. We’re not selling the product.” That goes a long way in building consumer confidence.
You’re going to have some guests who are upset because if you’re thinking and you want to have something specific and you get to the store or a specific location, you can’t have it. I know at the end of the day, if it’s me, I’m going to be upset because I probably traveled somewhere to get something. At the end of the day, I’m also going to be pretty happy to say, “I probably didn’t spend $10 or $12 and get a product that I’m not going to be 100% satisfied with.” They had the wherewithal and the foresight to pull the product and not serve a product that was 110%. To me, that goes a long way. It helps in building consumer confidence over a long period of time.
I want to go back to something you said as a part of that beginning answer there. Career growth, incentives to keep people, do you see people come in as front-of-house, management, or regional managers? Is that a trajectory for folks?
Career Growth Opportunities
Absolutely. If you have cooks who come in and the cooks are experienced, the goal is to try to teach the cooks and let them run through every single station. Learn the stations. Learn why we’re different, which is what our motto is, “We are different,” from every other QSR. Once you can learn why we’re different and what we do differently, the goal is to try to move you up through the ranks. Move you into a management position or into either a lead cook or a supervisor position. Run a busy store. Run a busy shift. Run a different outlet.
Flexibility is key for us. We train cooks to run every station, promoting them to management roles as they grow.
There’s also the one thing that we take into consideration, which, a lot of times, is flexibility. Flexibility for us is important as it is with an employee, too. Having that flexibility allows you to see different shifts at different times of the day when different things are going on. That helps an employee. It helps them to see what the entire business is instead of getting a small snapshot and only being able to see one small window.
I did get a good feel for that culture piece and that growth piece when I looked at it. We hit on a lot quickly. Is there anything that we didn’t hit on or anything you folks have coming down the road that you want to introduce, location-wise? Is there anything else you want to share about websites or socials? Please feel free to do that.
LTOs are a constant growth for us. We’re always looking for feedback from our guests. What do they want to see? What things excite them? Where do they want us to go next? There are so many locations that I’d need a half hour to tell you where the locations are specifically as to where we’re opening up. The European market is another huge, tremendous market for us where we’re going to see some pretty explosive growth. We’re also looking in Australia and in the Middle East, where there’s been a tremendous desire to get us there for a while now.
Very exciting stuff. A brand that’s on the rise. Folks, check them out. That was Chef Shawn Edelman of The Halal Guys. You can find them at TheHalalGuys.com. For more great restaurant marketing, operations, service people, and tech tips, stay tuned to us here at RunningRestaurants.com. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, Chef.
Thank you so much. Have a great day.
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